During an average follow-up of 7.4 years, the researchers found that 8 percent of patients died of cardiovascular causes. Cardiovascular mortality increased with increasing CAC: using CAC 0 to 9 as the reference group, the odds ratio increased from 2.93 for CAC 10 to 99 to 11.23 for CAC ≥1,000. The area under the curve was improved by the addition of CAC and was 0.70 for the Framingham risk score without CAC and 0.75 with CAC. Net reclassification improvement with the addition of CAC was 0.13.